Two regions of ocean are said to be mysteriously dangerous. What’s the truth behind this popular belief?

Today we’re going to hit the high seas, and venture into a matched pair of alleged danger zones where ships and airplanes are said to disappear at an alarming rate. Some believe that the Bermuda Triangle and its twin, the Devil’s Sea south of Japan, are merely regions where natural forces combine to form a genuine navigational hazard; while others believe that some unknown agent is responsible for sweeping the hapless travelers from the face of the Earth. Today we’re going to dive into the waters to see how deep the mysteries really are. Let’s begin with:

The Bermuda Triangle

It’s perhaps the best known of all the world’s regions said to be strangely treacherous. The triangle goes from Miami to Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and despite a huge amount of normal shipping traffic passing through it every day, stories persist that some force there lurks to pull ships and planes to a watery grave.

The most common appearance of the Bermuda Triangle today is on television documentaries and popular books that purport to take a “science-based” look at the phenomenon. They give the appearance of skepticism by dismissing the paranormal explanations like psychic energy, Atlantis, or alien abductions, and instead focus on natural phenomena that could be responsible for disappearances. These include rogue waves, undersea methane explosions, or strange geomagnetic fluctuations. They test these explanations with scale models and sophisticated simulations.

But in fact, this representation of being scientific is wrong. To investigate the Bermuda Triangle scientifically, we would start with an observation, and then test hypotheses to explain it. Popular programming today tends to skip the very first step: actually having an observation to explain.

One of the first things you learn when researching the Bermuda Triangle responsibly — which means including source material beyond the TV shockumentaries and pulp paperbacks that promote the mystery wholeheartedly — is that transportation losses inside the Bermuda Triangle do not occur at a rate higher than anywhere else, and the number of losses that are unexplained is also not any higher. Statistically speaking, there is no Bermuda Triangle. The books and TV shows are trying to explain an imaginary observation. MORE . . .

The Devil’s Sea

It goes by many names: the Devil’s Sea, the Dragon’s Triangle, and the Taiwan Triangle; and, just as is the Bermuda Triangle, it’s even sometimes called the Devil’s Triangle. Its location varies a bit depending on which author you read, but the triangle usually runs from Taiwan up to the volcanic island of Miyake-jima just south of Tokyo, to about Iwo-jima or thereabouts. Miyake-jima and Iwo-jima lie along the Izu-Bonin volcanic arc, a line of underwater volcanoes and islands that’s part of a system stretching 2500 kilometers from Japan to Guam. Some, like Charles Berlitz, say that the Devil’s Sea is every bit as dangerous and mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle.

In his 1989 book The Dragon’s Triangle, Berlitz said that Japan lost five military vessels in the area between 1952 and 1954 alone, with a loss of some 700 sailors. In Dan Cohen’s 1974 book Curses, Hexes, & Spells it’s reported that legends of the danger of the Devil’s Sea go back for centuries in Japan. Its most famous casualty was the No. 5 Kaiyo-Maru, a scientific research vessel, which disappeared with the loss of all hands on September 24, 1953 (a date often wrongly reported as 1952 or 1958).

With such a dramatic history, you’d expect there to be all sorts of books on the subject, especially in Japan. But it turns out that the eager researcher is disappointed. A search for books, newspaper, or magazine articles on the Devil’s Sea comes up completely empty, until a full 20 years after the loss of the Kaiyo-Maru. Apparently, the story — even the very existence of this legendary named region — was not invented until very recently. MORE . . .